


Grave Dirt

by Lissadiane



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Fae Shenanigans, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, fae, kinda pre-slash I guess, scott isn't a great friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:15:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23825173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane
Summary: “You think there are better worlds out there than this one?” Stiles asks, stretched out on his back with graveyard dirt underneath him, grinding against his shoulder blades as he gestures up at the starry sky. He’s drunk, ostensibly over Lydia, probably actually over some existential combination of despair and terror of the unknown and maybe a little bit more of the known, now that he knows it involves werewolves and who the fuck knows what else.In which Stiles has existential questions that neither Scott nor the fae have answers for.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 43
Kudos: 594





	Grave Dirt

**Author's Note:**

> This is a birthday fic for my dear friend [Skoosie](https://pantstomatch.tumblr.com/) who deserves an epic and amazingly long and in dept fic about something important and fluffy and maybe involving certain dudes from Stranger Things but I can't write that or them so this is what I wrote instead. Which is kind of a mess. And you deserve better because you are amazing. I submit this birthday fic to you with my most sincere apologies.

“You think there are better worlds out there than this one?” Stiles asks, stretched out on his back with graveyard dirt underneath him, grinding against his shoulder blades as he gestures up at the starry sky.

He’s drunk, ostensibly over Lydia, probably actually over some existential combination of despair and terror of the unknown and maybe a little bit more of the known, now that he knows it involves werewolves and who the fuck knows what else.

Scott’s not drunk because Scott is no longer capable of it. Now that he’s a werewolf. Which is fucking terrifying, so Stiles takes another swig of whiskey and chokes it down and tries to remember Lydia. Lydia, Lydia, with her strawberry blonde hair and her pouty, sharp smile, and her dimple and the way she’s smarter than anyone he’s ever known.

That’s what he wants to think about today.

And if sometimes his brain slips and thinks about… leather jackets and chiseled jaws and, holy fuck, thighs and shoulders and that ass in those jeans and the way he can’t help feel even when he’s being slammed up against a wall or against that body –

Fuck, shit, he’s thinking about Lydia who is soft in all the right places and not – not – not that.

Why does whiskey taste like assholes and who decided to get drunk in a graveyard in the middle of the night with someone who can’t get drunk?

Mistakes were made, that’s all he’s saying.

“What,” Scott says, squinting up at the same stars and a hysterical little part of Stiles’ brain wonders if he even sees the same sky anymore because weren’t dogs, like, colour blind? “Like aliens, you mean?”

It takes a minute for Stiles’ fragmented mind to sort through what Scott’s saying and what Stiles is thinking because his train of thought has been so thoroughly derailed, but he eventually finds the track – the better worlds track.

“No,” he says. “Like alternate timelines where the shit show of today never happened. Where we’re still nobodies in high school trying to make first string in lacrosse. Where all I had to drink about was Lydia and not – and not –”

He takes another drink and squeezes his eyes shut because the stars have begun spinning wildly and he’s going to be sick and before he can find the words for that, Scott’s phone rings and he says, “Oh, oh, it’s _Allison_ ,” like it would be anyone else when the only other person who ever calls him is currently about to asphyxiate on his own vomit in the graveyard beside him.

Even though apparently they broke up.

Hence the drinking.

It was a stupid plan.

“I gotta go, Stiles, she wants to meet, is it okay – are you –”

“Yeah, Scotty,” Stiles says, and Scott’s gone before he finishes the sentence. And it’s fine, it’s fine, it doesn’t trigger any carefully compartmentalized concerns about not belonging anywhere at all, about being abandoned, about being alone, in a goddamned graveyard with only the whiskey and the dead for company while Scott runs off and pretends he doesn’t have a fucked up alpha just begging him to belong.

So Stiles just lies still and waits for the world to slow down and go still underneath him. And he thinks about the bodies below him, rotting, and he wonders if they’re skeletons or dust or if he’s a skeleton or if he’s dust or if he’s made of star dust the way he read that he was and he holds his hands up and stares at his fingers, silhouetted by the starry sky behind, smudged in grave dirt.

And he feels suddenly like the only dust he’s made of is grave dust and he starts to panic.

And that’s when the fae finds him.

*

He wakes up sick and delirious, resting on a bed that feels made of clouds or cobwebs, naked except for a sheer and silky sheet draped over him, and at first, he thinks the man standing beside his bed is a figment of his fever. He’s too tall, too skinny, too brittle, with long limbs that hang at odd angles from his body. He’s too pale, like polished moonstone, and his eyes are the wrong shape and deep and dark and cold.

And then the figure touches him with cold, sharp, long fingers, trailing down his chest, and his voice sounds like rustling trees in the dark forest, like rain on the roof.

“You’re pretty,” he says, leaning closer. His ears are pointed. “Like moonlight.”

“I’m grave dirt,” Stiles tells him, drifting away on fever dreams again.

“I’m going to keep you.”

*

And Stiles is kept.

He doesn’t know how long it lasts. They keep him fed and whatever they feed him drifts through his body like a fever, bringing with it dreams and hallucinations. He sees his father, crying at his mother’s grave. He sees Scott, chasing Allison through the forest, gaining on her, his eyes burning bright and red and his fangs dripping. He sees Lydia, laughing and spinning like a doll until her feet start to bleed and the bones in her feet crack like twigs. He sees Erica, howling at a moonless sky while blood pours from her eyes and into her mouth and nobody howls back.

Sometimes reality comes in, filtered through a haze of drugs and fever. He’s strung up like a puppet, dancing for a room full of otherworldly creatures who call him Grave Dirt like it’s a term of endearment. He swings and sways and tries to blink away the haze but it clings and lingers.

And maybe, he thinks, this is belonging. Maybe this is what it feels like to be part of something, to have a place, even if that place is a puppet for malicious creatures with sharp fingers and teeth and tongues.

Maybe this is all he’s good for.

Maybe this is better than being made up of grave dirt because now, sometimes, at least, a tiny bit… now he feels like he’s made up of moonlight. And stars. And things that sparkle and shine. And it hurts, but what doesn’t?

So he drifts and he dances and floats and gives himself up to it and stops trying, stops fighting, stops bothering to open his tired eyes.

*

When Derek comes to save him, it’s quick and sudden, vicious and bloody, and the most shocking part about it is that Derek came at all.

Once the fae are dead and Stiles is laying in a heap of silk and spiderweb, struggling to breathe through the drugs and see with eyes that got so used to being shut, all he can think, as the moonstone walls of the fae palace fade out into whitewashed and petrified trees, is that he hadn’t thought anyone would notice he was gone at all.

“Derek,” he hums, when Derek, bathed in blood and bright sunlight, leans over him and grabs him with rough hands and a hint of claw. It feels so much more human than the touch of the fae ever had. “You came.”

“Of course I did,” Derek snaps, still searching him for injury, still digging through the silk that’s quickly becoming more cobweb than anything else. “Are you – did they –”

Stiles reaches up with clumsy hands and pats at his cheek, feeling his jaw and his beard and his nose and his lips because he’s not quite sure Derek is real. “It’s a fairy tale,” he says, unable to help a small, sharp, anxious laugh. “Is it a fairy tale?”

“Fuck the fairies,” Derek snarls and Stiles’ laugh grows more hysterical.

“Fuck the fairies,” he agrees, and Derek picks him up and carries him home.

*

The drugs leave his body slowly, like coffee brewing drop by drop, and then finally, one morning, Stiles blinks his eyes open and the world stops spinning.

“It’s come to my attention,” Derek says, and Stiles turns his head and sees that he’s in Derek’s loft, in his bed, and he can see straight into the kitchen from here. Derek’s in sweats and a tank top with a dish towel over his shoulder. His hair doesn’t have any of his usual carefully gelled style. His beard needs a trim and his feet are bare and he’s flipping pancakes. “That you have somehow missed the fact that you’re as much a part of my Pack as Scott would be, if he wasn’t such an idiot.”

“Did I miss that?” Stiles asks, voice croaking in an embarrassing way. He’s not sure if it’s because he’s dehydrated or because he suddenly wants to cry. “How do you know?”

“Because you just spent three days since we got you back from the fae telling us how you’re grave dirt made of stars who wants to climb Derek like a tree,” Erica says brightly, and Stiles makes himself dizzy snapping his head around to see her curled up on the couch. She waves with a grin. “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Don’t worry. We’d all climb Derek like a tree, if given the chance.”

“I never said that,” Stiles tells her, but he looks back at Derek whose cheeks are burning just a little pink above his beard. “I didn’t.”

“Sure, princess,” Erica says.

“I can’t be held responsible for the things I said while under the influence,” Stiles tries desperately. Derek remains stony and silent and focused on his pancakes which is just making it worse. “I climb lots of trees,” he adds. “Platonically.”

Erica just laughs like she doesn’t believe him and Derek’s got a plate loaded up with pancakes like the idea of Stiles eating pancakes in his bed doesn’t make him want to run screaming from the room.

Stiles’ mouth gapes open unattractively as Derek sits beside him on the bed, handing him the plate, and he waits until Stiles has shoved an entire pancake into his mouth to say, quiet and intense and impossibly sincere, “Stiles, I thought you knew. We’re going to keep you.”

And Stiles thinks, maybe this time, he wouldn’t mind being kept.


End file.
